Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(71)

Words tumbled out, one on top of the other. “Most spirits move on immediately after death, but some linger in the border between. It’s how we were able to call Aren to us, during the séance. The spirits that do delay their final passage . . . they want to be seen. And when they are seen, they want to tell their stories.”

“What?” His eyebrows knitted together, and a bemused smile crossed his lips.

“I know all this because I see them. Because it’s me they want to communicate with. I don’t know why . . . but the dead have been as much a part of my life as the living, for as long as I can remember.”

His smile slowly faded.

“I saw her, Zan. Your mother. I saw her at the tower. Her spirit. That day you went up the tower after me . . . I was there only because she wanted me to follow her. She wanted to show me how she died.”

He looked away sharply. I continued, as gently as possible, “I relived her last moments. She was with a healer from the village, Sahlma. She was talking about her son, who was ill. She knew he did not have long to live, and she couldn’t bear losing him. And so . . . and so . . . she took matters into her own hands. She did jump from the tower, but not because she wanted to die. She jumped so that her blood would spill onto the bloodleaf below. So that Sahlma could collect the bloodleaf flower petals and use them to save her son. You.”

He fell back a step, his hand balled into a fist over his heart. He was trying to keep his breathing steady and regular; I could almost keep time by his breaths. One, in. Two, out. Three, in. Four, out . . . I placed a hand on his arm, and when his eyes flicked up to mine, they had lost all traces of their cynical glint.

“She wasn’t abandoning you,” I said from my heart. “She loved you. She died for the mere hope that she could create the petals that could be used to save your life. She had to decide between herself and you. She chose you.”

He put both hands in his hair and turned his back to me. I could feel a shift in him as he rearranged the narrative of his life. His mother had saved him. It didn’t change the loss—?nothing ever would—?but the light in which he viewed her death had been altered irrevocably.

“Zan?” I asked, wanting to reach out to him but too nervous to try. “Are you all right?”

He took a long, deep breath. “No,” he said, “and . . . yes.” A crooked pillar was jutting from the fog, and he fell back against it as if suddenly exhausted, but his eyes were alive with emotion, somewhere in the realm between relief and regret.

I approached him timidly. “You believe me? You don’t think me mad?”

“With all the astonishing things I’ve seen since meeting you, you could tell me that you were the Empyrea herself and I would believe it.”

I didn’t move; I barely dared to breathe. Remembering his fearsome depiction of me on the wall, I said, “I’m just a girl, Zan, figuring things out as I go along. I’m just as lost and confused and lonely as everyone else.”

“Lost? No.” He took my hands in his. “Confused . . . I’d never guess it. Lonely?” He leaned his forehead against mine and said softly, “Not if I can help it.”

We were so close. I could feel the break of his breath across my cheek, soft and slow. I looked up at him, heart racing as he bent his face to meet mine.

And then the ground lurched beneath us.

He pulled me tight to him as the column he’d been leaning on shook loose and fell, breaking into jagged chunks. Beneath our feet, the earth heaved while the stones high above groaned and rained dust and stinging gravel down upon our heads. I clung to Zan’s hands, and we ran through the maelstrom to the hollow’s stooped entrance. Rocks began to fall, closing in the narrow way behind us.

On the other side, pine needles transformed into projectiles and sliced through the air like arrows on an undulating battlefield. Ahead of us, the trunk of a giant spruce snapped and moaned as it splintered at its base and fell across our path. We couldn’t go forward. We couldn’t go backwards. I could taste panic on my tongue, sharp and sour, like blood and bile.

Zan pulled me down against the side of the fallen tree and curled his body over mine, shielding me from debris as the ground gave one last great shudder and then, at last, lay still.

He got to his feet first, then quietly helped me to mine. The fog was gone, seemingly swallowed up into the shaking earth. Only dust remained; when it finally settled, it revealed an almost unrecognizable landscape. Tumbled rocks, broken trees, and several plumes of smoke rising from the heart of the city beyond, silhouetted by the first weak rays of a grim sun rising.

“No,” Zan murmured in shock. “We stopped him. It was over. This can’t be.”

But we both knew the truth: this was the sign of the death of the crone. The seal at Forest Gate had fallen.



* * *



It took us most of the night to pick our way through the disarray in the forest. We used the culvert passage to make it into the castle, but we could hear distant shouts coming from the city even through those subterranean walls. When we emerged on the other side, the first light of morning was breaking.

Zan had me wait in the storage room, in the mess of broken bottles and overturned casks, while he went to question the guard nearest the entrance of the dungeon cells.

“I’ll not ask again,” he was saying, his voice carrying a dangerous edge. “I left you here last night. I paid you well. Now tell me the truth: between then and now, have you let anybody in there with him? Has anybody gone out?”